When God Was a Rabbit (22 page)

The days spread out before me, interminable, senseless hours, and I went to a French café where I wasn’t known and where I didn’t have to deflect the ‘Any news?’ with polite ‘Not yet’s. I sat in the window and watched life pass, watched it head Uptown. I saw three young women walking arm in arm and they were laughing, and I realised that I hadn’t seen that in days; it looked so strange.

I wrote there. Wrote the column and wrote about the Lost. I wrote about the flowers at every fire station, piled three, five high, and the candles that never went out; prayers burning through despair, because it was still early days and you never knew, but of course most people did. People knew as they lay alone at night, that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory. I wrote about the sudden embraces in the middle of shops, and the funerals that appeared everyday for fire-fighters and cops, funerals that stopped the streetflow with a volley of salutes and tears. I wrote about the lost cityscape as I sat on our favourite bench along the promenade by Brooklyn Bridge; the place we went to to think and where we imagined what our lives would be three, five, ten years hence.

But most of all I wrote about
him
– now called Max – my brother, our friend, missing now for ten days. And I wrote about what I’d lost that morning. The witness of my soul, my shadow in childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.

Nancy went back to LA to work. She wasn’t ready, but they called her back and I said she’d never be ready so she had to go.

‘I’m thinking of coming back,’ she said.

‘To here, New York?’

‘No. To England. I miss it.’

‘It’s not perfect.’

‘Seems so after this.’

‘This could happen anywhere,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s safe. This will happen again.’

‘But I miss you lot,’ she said. ‘The everyday.’

‘You’ll feel different when you get that holster back on.’

‘Idiot,’ she said.

‘So come home,’ I said as I held her. ‘We need you.’

And as she opened the front door and headed down the stoop she turned and put on her sunglasses. ‘I’ll be all right, won’t I?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Flying. I’ll be all right?’

‘You’ll always be all right,’ I said.

She smiled. Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.

We went out to eat that night, just Charlie and I, the first and only night since I’d got there. We went to their place, to Balthazar, and we sat where they always sat, and people were discreet but still asked how we were and Charlie said, ‘We’re OK, thanks.’

We ate from platters of
fruits de mer
and drank Burgundy and ate steak frites and drank more Burgundy and did as they used to do, and we laughed and got drunk, until the restaurant thinned out and we were allowed to stay in the corner like the Forgotten, as they cleared around us and told jokes about the evening. And that’s when he told me. So unexpectedly. Told me about that room in Lebanon.

‘You can hold on to anything, Elly, to make you carry on.’

‘So what did you hold on to?’

Pause.

‘The sight of a lemon tree.’

He proceeded to tell me about the small window high up in his room, no glass, just open to the elements, his only source of light. He would climb up to it and hold himself in the draught of fresh air, the scented fresh air that made him feel less forgotten. He couldn’t hold on to the wall for long, and would drop back down into the darkness, where the smells were then his; humiliating and dirty, clinging.

A few days after they had taken his ear, he awoke very late in the afternoon and climbed up to the window and saw that a small lemon tree had been brought into the yard. And in the fading light, the lemons seemed to glow and they were beautiful, and his mouth watered, and there was a breeze and he could smell coffee, perfume, even mint. And for a moment he was all right because the world was still there, and the world out there was good, and when the world was good, there was hope.

I reached for his hand. It was cold.

‘I have to go back to England,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’

‘Not without him,’ he said.

I knew they’d want something with his DNA in case they found him, found something of him. I went into the bathroom before I left and bagged his toothbrush and a hairbrush, but not his favourite brush, in case he came back, you see; I left that on the side next to his aftershave, next to an old copy of
Rugby World
. I sat on the edge of the bath and felt so guilty that I was to go home and leave him there, but I had to go; had to go and bridge the distance that now separated my stricken parents. And so I left Charlie there, in the house we spent months working on, the house with the bird’s nest and the ailanthus tree and the old gold coin we’d found whilst digging out the garden. I left Charlie there to man the phone line, to make calls to the Embassy, and to be there when they called. Charlie, the old hand at trauma; Charlie, the unexpected proof that life can sometimes turn out all right.

It is all so much smaller. The shops have gone, wiped clean except from memory. The deli, the newsagent, the butcher with its sawdust floor, and the smart shoe shop we never went in, they’ve all gone. I don’t feel sad, feel nothing, simply nothing. I drive along, signal left and turn into the street where we all began.

I don’t stop outside, but a few houses before, and I see the swish of saris now, the changing constellation of immigration. I imagined that I would walk up the path, the path that cut through the grass and the flowerbeds, and I would stand in front of the door and ring the bell. ‘I used to live here,’ I would say and there would be smiles and an invitation inside, and maybe even a cup of tea, and I would tell them stories of our life and tell them how happy we were, and they might look at each other and think, I hope their joy and luck rub off on us too.

There is a loud knock on my window. I look into the face of a man I don’t know. He seems angry. I lower the window.

‘Are you going yet? ’Cause I live here and I want to park.’

I say nothing to this man. I don’t like him and so I say nothing. I turn the ignition and pull away. I roll slowly down the street, until I see it. I stop outside. The wall has gone, garden gone, and a car is parked where the flowerbeds used to blossom. There is a porch, and I can see coats suspended in the condensation. I am a stranger. I drive on. Nothing is as it should be.

I look at my watch. Late. I am cold. Waiting for house lights to retire. The alleyway smells the same; I am alone. I see the movement of a fox. It comes closer – they’re urbanised now – I kick stones its way and it saunters off, unafraid but irritated. I look over the fence. As I do, the last light disappears. Now I feel nervous; definition of shadows all around. Is that a man? I move against the old gate. Blood pounding.
Move on, move on, move on
. I hear his footsteps recede on the gravel. I count the silence that remains.

I lift the latch easily and secure the gate with a brick. The small torch beam is surprisingly strong, and the jumble of junk at the bottom of the garden appears untouched, apart from the addition of fox faeces and an old trainer. Half a chicken carcass.

I dig through moist leaves until I hit the dirt. I follow the line down from the slatted fence and measure a hand’s-width away. I scoop out handfuls of earth until I feel the chilly sensation of tin. I pull it free and wipe the lid clean: Biscuit assortment (we ate them all).

I put nothing back, don’t cover my tracks. It will be blamed on a fox. I want to get away from here. I kick away the brick and secure the gate. I stride quickly away. Darkness enfolds the wake of my presence. I was never there.

The Polaroid is surprisingly clear in the early morning light. The girl who became a boy. I am smiling, (I am hiding). The Christmas of my rabbit. Leave something behind, he had said.

I reach for my coffee. I put on another layer and look out over the familiar of my adult world. I unfold his letter. The scrawl of his fifteen-year-old handwriting grips my throat – to my eyes, a jumble of ciphers. To free, to explain.

I arrived as a grey afternoon chill descended upon the station and heralded my arrival with the promise of nothing. The station was quiet; only one other passenger disembarked with me, a passenger who carried his home on his back and who strode up the hill with the practised gait of a professional walker. I let him go ahead.

I’d told no one I was coming, not even Alan, and had simply picked up a local cab outside the station. In truth I’d wanted to stay in London, away from everything that said, This is Joe; for the views and the smells and the trees were all him as they were also me, intertwined as we were in this landscape, forged and rooted and held.

I asked to be dropped at the top of the roadway by the old bar gate, by the mossy indented word
TREHAVEN
that we’d first seen twenty-three years ago, when we were poised on the edge of adventure, me with a timid yearning to start my life again, him with a broken heart that had never healed.

It was cold and I wore too little, but the cold felt good and it cleared my head, allowed me to stop and listen to the faint drilling of a woodpecker. And as the hill took me down towards the house, the space he’d left seized me and something somewhere in that space whispered,
He’s still here
. I heard it as the hill propelled me towards the silence of meal times and the masked pain, and the open photo albums no longer stored away in musty drawers.
He’s still here
, it whispered as my pace quickened and my tears fell,
still here
, until I started to run.

They were in the kitchen, all three of them, drinking tea and eating sponge cake. It was Nelson, Arthur’s guide dog, who noticed me first, the little chocolate-brown Labrador who’d become his eyes a year ago when mine could no longer commit full time. He bounded towards the door and barked, and I saw Arthur smile because he knew the bark, knew what it meant, and my mother and father got up and ran towards me, and everything seemed strangely normal that first moment when I arrived. The cracks appeared only after I went up to my room.

I hadn’t heard her behind me; the weight she’d lost made her tread lighter, or maybe I was distracted by the sudden emergence of a photograph on my dresser, a photo of me and Joe at Plymouth Navy Days, when we were young, a photo I hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years. He was wearing a sailor’s hat and I had wanted to laugh, but it hadn’t been placed in irony, and so I didn’t. My mother picked it up and looked at it – ran her fingers across his face, ran them across her brow.

‘We were so lucky that he was ours,’ I said.

My mother carefully replaced the photograph.

Silence.

‘I’ve never been a crazy person, Elly, not hysterical. I’ve been rational all my life and so when I say, he’s not dead, it’s not wishing or hoping, it’s rational; it’s clear thought.’

‘OK,’ I said, and started to unzip my bag.

‘Your father thinks I’m mad. Walks away when I say such things, says it’s grief making me mad, making me say such things, but I know it, Elly. I know it I know it I know it.’

I stopped unpacking. Halted by the desperate grip of her words.

‘Where is he then, Mum?’

She was about to answer when she saw my father standing in the doorway. He looked at her and came towards me and handed me a pile of old
Cornish Times
.

‘Thought you might like these,’ he said, and backed out of the room, hardly looking at my mother.

‘Stay,’ I said, but he chose not to hear me and I heard his footsteps heavy and sad on the oaken staircase.

I found him in his workroom. A stooped figure, suddenly old. A makeshift lamp was clamped to an overhead shelf just behind him, and his face appeared soft and masked in the illuminated dust, his eyes dark and sad. He didn’t look up as I came in and I went over and sat on the old armchair, the one we’d brought from our old terraced house in Essex, the one that was re-covered in burnt-orange cotton twill.

‘I’d do anything,’ he said, ‘anything to have him back. I pray and I want to believe her, I so do. And I feel I am betraying her. But I saw the images, Elly. And every day I read about the fatalities.’

He picked up a sheet of sandpaper and started smoothing the edge of the bookcase he’d almost finished.

‘I’ve always known something like this would happen. Something has always hung over this family. Something, just waiting. I can’t hope any more. Because I don’t deserve hope.’

He stopped working and leant over his bench. I knew what he was talking about again and I quietly said, ‘That was all a long time ago, Dad.’

‘Not for her family, Elly. It’s still like yesterday for them,’ he said. ‘Their grief is my grief now. The circle’s complete.’